Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
The solution is an urgent subversive engagement. There is no time left. The general election is barely nine months away. And there is as yet no credible opposition in sight. The proposed rival ADC remains a pipedream weighed down by the gigantic ambitions of its dreamers and proponents. To found an opposition party less than a year before a general election and expect to snatch victory from the claws of a vicious ruling party is the height of political comedy.
Even if the opposition coalition were serious, its founding uncles are all open presidential candidates, each mostly without an organic followership of their own. The ambitions of the key patrons have been placed ahead of the formation of an opposition platform. Our fledgling opposition party is very Nigerian; a non -existent party with numerous presidential candidates.
The anticipation of an opposition ascendancy in 2027 is hoisted on the naïve hope that a groundswell of popular disdain for the APC and the misery of present living conditions will drive voters to oust the APC and its mascot, President Tinubu at the 2027 elections. How foolish! Granted, most street-side Nigerians and the urban elite are no fans of the lacklustre President Tinubu. But political followership is not a love affair. As at now, only Mr. Tinubu possesses the major indices of power as outlined by Bertrand Russel: Religion, Traditional authority, Coercion, Cash and Legacy Media.
Obviously, the ruling APC is rapaciously swallowing other parties and allegiances and in the process dominating the political landscape. Meanwhile, the opposition and the broad informed public continue to grumble at the spread of the APC. It is pointless sulking and grumbling. You do not challenge or topple a ruling party by crying in the market, no matter how loudly. You get engaged somehow. You either join the party of your conviction or gate –crash into the ruling party and drive change from inside.
In a democracy, every political party is a commonwealth asset. It belongs to all citizens. Membership for entry is open. Exit is also open. In places like Nigeria, parties believe in nothing. So, you do not need to know or subscribe to whatever the party stands for. Just enter the “danfo’ before you know where it is headed.
Just as governors, legislators and other political animals are trooping into the APC from other creaking parties, Nigerians are free to join the ruling party or form new ones. Nor is a political party the exclusive domain of any cult or group. Internal democracy requires that power and control of a party be wielded by elected leaders. So, instead of standing afar and casting stones at the APC, the broad masses and the grumbling elite should join the party.
As matters stand at this moment and given the proximity of the 2027 elections, the most effective antidote to the rampaging expansion of the APC is for Nigerians to troop into the party. As many conscious Nigerians as possible should join and occupy the APC. That way, the present membership of the party will be overwhelmed by hordes of new members with a broad range of new ideas, tendencies and inclinations to challenge the present Tinubu-led oligarchy and mafia.
The aim of such an invasion would be to subvert, destabilize and disrupt the APC’s present hegemonic slumber. Droves of new members will come with their ambitions, tendencies and agenda. In the process, factions and tendencies will emerge in the party and make the management of the party a challenging task. The new popular majority will disorganize the existing order in the party. The hegemony of the Akpabios, Umahis and part time political entrepreneurs like Wike will be neutralized. The current reckless nattering of these nabobs of negativism will be swallowed by the yell of popular membership.
The grand strategy of invading the APC would be to infuse the party with a truly diverse Nigerian character and liberate it from the stranglehold of the present political oligarchs. A populist broad based membership will hopefully compel the party to develop a body of beliefs and an agenda that addresses the urgent concerns of the masses.
Most importantly, the underlying assumption that the APC is Tinubu’s personal political machinery oiled by a financial armada of undisclosed source needs to be challenged by an expanded membership base. At least the resources of the party will be spread over the demands of a wider membership spread.
By their nature, political parties are the cornerstone of a democratic political space. The larger and more inclusive they are, the stronger they tend to be as aggregations of the popular will. Therefore, it ought to be good news that the APC is absorbing more Nigerians into its fold. Nigeria is a big country.The bigger the parties, the more stable, inclusive and diverse the political architecture of the nation. An inclusive party membership can become an instrument of national cohesion and an additional national security guarantee.
A dysfunctional political party controlled by a political cult or mafia is a danger to democracy. In its present format, the APC is one such danger. If left alone as is, it could grow into a dangerous one– party dictatorship. It is already behaving like one. It is baby-sitting the National Assembly. It is gobbling up as many state governors as it can find. But no one in its bulging membership is challenging the Tinubu oligarchy. We cannot afford to leave theAPC to Tinubu and his personal recruits and cohorts.
We should all join the APC as a national political infrastructure and use it to rescue and revamp Nigeria. True, the party is a bad assemblage of politicians with a surfeit of bad manners. Buhari used it to capture power by frightening off the clueless Jonathan. Through an openly transactional succession arrangement, Buhari handed over Nigeria to Tinubu and his inchoate cabal of ethnicists and religious merchants.
In power and in office, the party has literally run the nation aground in the last 11 years. The economy has tanked just as living conditions have worsened. Hunger is everywhere, just as all costs-medicare, power, school fees, rents, groceries- have jumped to the skies. National security has been eroded as the security of life and property has evaporated in most places. The nation is perennially in the dark as power supply and distribution are at their lowest ebb in the last 12 months. The presidential complex is about to migrate itself to an ultra –modern solar system, leaving the people in the grips of a Medieval power infrastructure that delivers mostly darkness.
As a party, the APC has laid no claims to a guiding ideology or programme. It just exists as a machinery for power-grabbing and organized criminal monopoly of state control. These negatives make the APC a prime candidate for internal change and reform. Such change cannot come from the present crop pf members and leadership. They are mostly devotees and apostles of the Tinubu gospel of “carry go” politics. A wider quantum of members is what the party needs. The party needs ‘unbelievers’, radical masses of members who will challenge the status quo and advocate for change from within.
The opposition faction and the popular masses are understandably lamenting the mass exodus of governors into the ruling APC. People cannot understand the logic. A non–performing ruling party full of negatives has kidnapped over 31 of out of 36 states. Droves of politicians across the country are trooping into the party from others by the day. Observers see this as negative. People even fear that we are drifting into a one-party state.
I am not party to this fear. Nor do I see the mass migration into the APC as a negative development. Quite the contrary. It is true the APC under Buhari and Tinubu has ruined and wrecked the country. They have presided over a systematic erosion of the nation. They have devalued the Nigerian state by outsourcing its governance to political contractors and assorted cranks. But the future of a genuine multi –party democracy in Nigeria may in fact lie in an APC that is so large that it bulges and implodes under pressure from a diversity of tendencies and factions.
A creative invasion of the APC is a long-term strategic necessity. Allowing the party to further enlarge in its present rudderlessness is a danger. But an increasingly popular and more enlightened membership will enhance the party’s internal democracy and improve the quality of its membership. A more diverse membership will raise more questions about the programme and manifesto of the party as it concerns the wider concerns of the national constituency.
The leaders and elements of the fledgling opposition should equally join the APC if they wish. There is after all no real difference between the leadership of the opposition and those leading the APC. In fact, they all belong to the same political family. They all used to be in the PDP, APC and other parties together before they fell out of power and favour. Atiku, Amaechi, Obi, El Rufai, David Mark and the other purported leaders of the ADC were bred in the PDP, mostly flirted with the APC and other parties before they found themselves out in the cold political wilderness of the present. It will not cost them anything to rejoin their kith and kin in the ruling party to struggle for power. Those looking up to the leadership of the proposed opposition as messiahs need pity. These people are the same as the bunch of rascals in the APC!
That way, they do not need to scout for new money to fund a futile opposition project. Tinubu and the APC already have a war chest funded mostly from ‘surplus value’ from our commonwealth. It is easier for them to scramble over these resources from within the APC as they scramble for pre-eminence in the commanding heights of a common party bulging piggy bank.
Struggling for power from within the ruling party will perhaps lead to a real power struggle among the present breed of the political elite. Perhaps a real balance and distribution of power among the leading political leaders may result since there are no real ideological or policy differences between the APC leaders and their opposition challengers.
Unless the present insularity of the APC is challenged, dismantled and subjected to a more rigorous interrogation, the party seems poised to win the 2027 elections to the exclusion of the opposition and the broad majority of Nigerians. Discord and political instability will follow.
An unpopular president presiding over a party with a track record of incompetence and betrayal will return to power for another four years. Sixteen years of Buhari plus Tinubu will literally bury the Nigerian ideal under the rubble of incompetence and mass misery.
The election will have no credibility. Voter apathy will increase, leading to low voter turnout. Our democracy will not be majority rule but ‘minority rule’ to the exclusion of the majority. Alienation will persist while a subtle autocracy and eventual authoritarianism will grow from what was intended as a popular democracy. The privatization of the institutions of state- armed and security services, the civil service, the deep state, etc., will become total.
If allowed to persist, the present exclusionary party hegemony could kill the prospects of democratic evolution in Nigeria. A nation that managed to survive the ravages of military dictatorship may end up as a casualty of democracy of bad manners.
